Brown’s attempted exercise of this power in the past has been found to violate federal law. A federal court in 2007 held that Brown violated the Voting Rights Act by engaging in intentional racial discrimination. One example of illegal activity was that the defendant Ike Brown sought to scare voters away from voting by listing their names in a newspaper and announcing they may be subject to challenge if they tried to vote. Brown flexed this imaginary power, so he said, because there were really “stealth Republicans” and he didn’t want them in his primary. Mississippi has open primaries. District Court Judge Tom Lee (S.D.M.S.) knew better. He found Brown sought to exclude people from voting in the primary because of race:

“The question is whether Brown’s action with respect to this list of 174 voters was actuated by these party loyalty concerns or whether this was pretext for a true purpose to discourage white voters from coming to the polls, or some combination of the two. The court has carefully weighed the evidence and finds that while party concerns were a factor in Brown’s actions, race played a role as well. . . . In sum, the court is of the opinion that Brown had the names of these white voters published in part because of party loyalty concerns, but also as an attempt to discourage white voters from voting in the 2003 Democratic primary.” 494 F. Supp. 2d 440 (S.D. Miss. 2007)

So fast forward to 2010. Behavior which a federal court has decided was motivated by an illegal racial intent – the intent to create a scheme where Ike Brown could prevent voters from participating in an election because of their race – is now before the Justice Department for approval. Ike Brown is seeking the sanction of the Justice Department to engage in the same activity which a court held demonstrated Brown’s racial intent to discriminate.